Solutions Architect Developer Salary in 2024

Solutions Architect

What is a Solution Architect?

A solution architect is therefore a master practitioner, leading other individuals and teams in the practice of solution architecture: the specialty of designing, describing and managing tech engineering to solve a particular class of business problems. For instance, protection of customer data under GDPR and other privacy regulations is a problem at the business level. The specialty defines how those requirements map to the tangible functions of a particular then-yet-to-exist software.

Among the tasks of solution architects are:

• Finding the best tech solution to solve existing business problems
• Describing the software’s structure, characteristics, behavior, and other aspects to project stakeholders
• Defining features, development phases, and solution requirements
• Providing specifications for which the solution is defined, managed, and delivered

Although all of those processes can be managed internally, some companies offer solution architecture consulting as a discrete set of services.

What does a Solution Architect do?

The solution architecture must not only be sound, thereby allowing the implementation team to develop the product within schedule and budget, but it must also be effective in solving the problem at hand and pleasant for its end-users. So, what are the primary processes that the solution architect should oversee?

Matching solutions with the corporate environment

Operating systems, an information context or integration requirements are most of the time already in place while a company has chosen a solution architect to deliver a new system. It is the solution architect’s job to make sure the new system fits the existing enterprise environment. To do that, you have to know how all pieces of the business-model puzzle fit together – how processes are linked and run, how operating systems tie together, how application architectures interact with hard- and software. It helps them to know this, so that they can design a solution that fits to the given environment.

Meeting the requirements of all stakeholders

The most important part from the process of creating a software product is estimation of stakeholders needs. All production of software products has a wide range of internal and external stakeholders, either technical or non-technical professionals. Solution architecture always ensure will product contain all the needs. The solution architect or its equivalent should be a regular sponsor of the product and explain development processes, costs and budgets. An architect should always translate project technical details in a corporate ‘language’ for management purposes and for non-technical stakeholders.

Accounting for project constraints

Each project has its limitations, which are usually referred to as constraints. These include:

• Technology
• Risks
• Scope
• Cost
• Quality
• Time
• Resources

For example, a product is created with tech stacks that must match its modules. Project scope is a type of documentation that communicates specific goals, tasks, features, and functions. All projects have budgets.

While each is a constraint, all have limits, and it is the role of the solution architect to understand all these constraints, compare and contrast them, and then take technological and managerial decisions to reconcile these constraints with the project’s goals.

Selecting the project technology stack

Identifying the right technologies for developing a product is one of the significant aspects of creating solution architecture. Technology stack will directly affect the technical architecture strategy. Programming languages, database management systems, messaging systems – there are plenty of practices to choose from. So, a solution architecture function communicates what is the best for a particular project in a given situation. It’s not just an plain old task of assessing and comparing technologies.

Compliance with non-functional requirements

Any software project should have non-functional requirements — additional descriptors of the qualities required for the system. They are also called quality attributes. Most of the products have quite the same set of non-functional requirements. They are security, performance, maintainability, scalability, usability, and reliability. The task of the solution architect is to analyse all non-functional requirements and make sure the result of the product engineering process is compliant with them.

Solution architect job description and responsibilities

The solution architect is a level above the project management level and deals with the solution-level decisions and analysis of these decisions’ impact on the business goals and outcomes. The role of a solution architect is similar to that of an architect in the construction domain, who creates an overall blueprint of a future building. This individual needs to know the state of available technologies to propose the most suitable solution to the incoming requirements and the current environment of the organisation.

A solution architect’s work product is the set of underlying solutions and the way they are implemented. Following the strategic technical vision of the product being developed, the solution architect makes an estimate of the budget and writes down a document to be presented to the stakeholders. Once it is agreed, the solution architect oversees the development and provides the stakeholders with status updates.

A solution architect’s responsibilities directly derive from processes in practice:

• Analyzing the technology environment
• Analyzing enterprise specifics
• Analyzing and documenting requirements
• Setting the collaboration framework
• Creating a solution prototype
• Participating in technology selection
• Controlling solution development
• Supporting project management

Though it’s fair to say that most of these are leadership responsibilities of a solution architect, this is really just to help PM activities stay focused on resources, risk, planning, etc in a way that supports the solution aims.

Solution architect skills and resume

If you’ve realised that you need a solution architect on your projects, the question remains how you go about finding and hiring one. We’ve reviewed the key skills we think a good architect must have.

Technical background and experience

So a solution architect has a background in at least one of these IT technical areas, in addition to non-technical areas such as management and business processes. A solution architect must specialise in the area of their technical background while also demonstrating proficiency in one or more of the following:

• IT architecture, infrastructure, and cloud development
• Engineering and software architecture design
• Business analysis
• DevOps
• Project and product management

You’ll usually need a minimum of eight years of experience so that the SA has seen many scenarios, issues and projects and, in addition to solid hands-on experience, has deep knowledge of industry best practices, grassroots new technologies and problem-solving approaches.

Excellent communication skills

Communication is also key to a solution architect’s skills. Given that the role involves negotiating with stakeholders, identifying requirements of all parties, mitigating risk, product delivery, and governance – failure to communicate effectively will definitely create a bottleneck. The role involves working with enterprise and software architects, business analysts and project teams, hence the need for a good solution architect to listen, advise, empathise and explain.

Deep analytical skills

You can’t design anything if you don’t know how the different elements fit together. ‘You have to understand the corporate strategy, and you have to understand all the business processes that define by which [tech set-up] the company is going to get to its strategic goals,’ explains Ayubhai Nanda, VP solution architecture at Infosys, a leading Indian IT company. But to design that set-up, a solution architect also needs to understand tech details. This means that solution architects spend much of their working day on analytic work, shuttling between various layers of the business.

Project and resource management skills

A solution architect does not directly participate into project management, but this does not exclude making any calculations of deadlines and given resources. Solution architects need to understand which solution is better and which one is useless in a given situation. They should be focused on the business results and how to achieve them inside particular timeframes and conditions of resources.

On top of this, the answer is that solution architects must think long term, envisioning a future where the scale and form of the solution could change to reflect what we know today cannot be definitively proven in advance, and they direct the development toward the final target.